“t shared iden­tity mod­er­ated the effect of dis­tri­bu­tion on in­ter­per­sonal con­flict and that shared con­text mod­er­ated the effect of dis­tri­bu­tion on task con­flict”

“spon­ta­neous com­mu­ni­ca­tion was as­so­ci­ated with a stronger shared iden­tity and more shared con­text, our mod­er­at­ing vari­ables. Se­cond, spon­ta­neous com­mu­ni­ca­tion had a di­rect mod­er­at­ing effect on the dis­tri­bu­tion-con­flict re­la­tion­ship, miti­gat­ing the effect of dis­tri­bu­tion on both types of con­flict. W”

Note: I skipped de­scrip­tions of prob­lems for which I had already de­scribed the pa­per they were based on.

“Lan­guage asym­me­tries” are a big deal.

“Strate­gies in­cluded avoid­ing con­ver­sa­tions and meet­ings at which the lin­gua franca would be re­quired, delet­ing cor­re­spon­dence un­read, leav­ing meet­ings early, try­ing to con­trol at­ten­dance at meet­ings to ex­clude speak­ers of the less fa­mil­iar lan­guage, and switch­ing lan­guages in the mid­dle of meet­ings.”

“For ex­am­ple, on the In­dian side, team lead­ers were ac­tive work mon­i­tors. The im­por­tance of tasks was judged by how of­ten the team leader asked about progress. Lack of ac­tive leader mon­i­tor­ing in­di­cated to In­dian de­vel­op­ers that a task was unim­por­tant. This per­mit­ted de­vel­op­ers to agree to all re­quests, while tac­itly judg­ing the true im­por­tance of a task by the level of team lead mon­i­tor­ing. Thus the timing of work was linked to leader mon­i­tor­ing. Work also was of­ten car­ried out in bursts of ac­tivity af­ter a stated dead­line had passed. This was be­cause the dead­line was un­der­stood within cul­ture to be nom­i­nal in defer­ence to im­me­di­ate in­struc­tions of su­pe­ri­ors.” mean­while, their Ger­man su­pe­ri­ors ex­pected to be proac­tively no­tified of de­lays.

In the Flow, Be­ing Heard, and Hav­ing Op­por­tu­ni­ties: Sources of Power and Power Dy­nam­ics in Global Teams

Pamela Hinds

Daniela Retelny

Cather­ine Cramton

2015

“Over the last 10-15 years, re­search on global teams has grown dra­mat­i­cally, in­clud­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tions of team dy­nam­ics [6, 8, 23, 33], com­mu­ni­ca­tion struc­ture [10, 19], con­flict [20, 21], co­or­di­na­tion [16, 18] and lead­er­ship [11, 40]. Schol­ars have also stud­ied the use of tech­nol­ogy to sup­port [13, 17, 33, 38] and alle­vi­ate many of the challenges en­coun­tered by globally dis­tributed teams [3, 27, 28]”

“ Few stud­ies, how­ever, have ex­am­ined the power dy­nam­ics in global teams, par­tic­u­larly the sources of power and how work­ers re­spond to power im­bal­ances. This is de­spite the fact that the dis­tri­bu­tion of power can have profound and far-reach­ing effects on in­di­vi­d­ual be­hav­ior [9] and team out­comes [2, 41]”

“So­cial power has been defined as “asym­met­ric con­trol over val­ued re­sources in so­cial re­la­tions””

“power is more ob­jec­tive whereas sta­tus is in the eye of the be­holder.”

“work by French and Raven [15] re­ported six sources (bases) of power – le­gi­t­i­mate (po­si­tional), re­ward, co­er­cive, in­for­ma­tional, ex­pert, and refer­ent”

“ O’Leary and Mortensen [32] who ex­am­ined the con­figu­ra­tional im­bal­ance (rel­a­tive num­bers of team mem­bers) across two sites. They found that lo­ca­tions with (nu­mer­i­cal) minor­ity sub­groups were at a dis­ad­van­tage com­pared to lo­ca­tions with a rel­a­tively larger num­ber of team mem­bers.”

“They re­port that sep­a­ra­tion in time and space ac­cen­tu­ated differ­ences in sources of sta­tus (so­cial cap­i­tal), but that the on­shore lead­ers of these teams some­times shared their re­sources as a way to rene­go­ti­ate sta­tus differ­ences”

9 teams in­ter­viewed over 18 months

“Our anal­y­sis sug­gests that team mem­bers at some lo­ca­tions felt that they had less in­fluence and power than those at other lo­ca­tions. In­ter­est­ingly, it was not only those at head­quar­ters or those col­lo­cated with the largest num­ber of team mem­bers who felt pow­er­ful, al­though both of these were fac­tors. We found that the sources of power among these globally dis­tributed pro­fes­sion­als resided at differ­ent lo­ca­tions and fell into three cat­e­gories; ac­cess to in­for­ma­tion (be­ing in the flow), ac­cess to de­ci­sion mak­ers (be­ing heard), and op­por­tu­ni­ties for growth. When team mem­bers per­ceived that they had ac­cess to these re­sources, they felt that they could work effec­tively, in­fluence de­ci­sions of im­por­tance, and have ca­reer op­por­tu­ni­ties, but if few were pre­sent, they ex­pressed frus­tra­tion and dis­satis­fac­tion in their jobs.”

“, hav­ing the ex­per­tise lo­cated el­se­where cre­ated a de­pen­dency on team mem­bers at an­other lo­ca­tion, which re­duced lo­cal de­vel­op­ers’ sense of power”

“Hav­ing di­rect ac­cess to cus­tomers was also a crit­i­cal re­source for de­vel­op­ers and varied sig­nifi­cantly by lo­ca­tion”

Fac­tors that mat­ter in like­li­hood of power strug­gle:

Be­ing near executives

Numer­i­cal advantage

Ac­cess to customers

Ac­cess to de­ci­sion­mak­ers (e.g. prod peo­ple)

Op­por­tu­ni­ties for growth (ter­mi­nal goal)

Team with shared power had equal ac­cess to ex­ecs and other sources of power

“Power Con­tested In 4 of the 9 teams in our study, power was con­tested, some­times fiercely. Sur­pris­ingly, in all of these teams, the sources of power were rel­a­tively evenly split across lo­ca­tions.”

“in the ab­sence of a pow­er­ful or­ga­ni­za­tional bound­ary (ven­dor-client), power con­tests may be less eas­ily and quickly de­cided”

“In our anal­y­sis, power con­tests seemed to be dom­i­nated by con­cerns over op­por­tu­ni­ties for cap­tur­ing work and for growth.”

“ per­ceiv­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties for growth diluted power con­tests.”

“in­di­vi­d­u­als in power are less likely to share knowl­edge [26, 30]”

Suggested fixes:

“ two-way chan­nel be­tween lead­ers and dis­tant work­ers that would provide more ac­cess to strate­gic in­for­ma­tion, more op­por­tu­nity to con­tribute to de­ci­sions, and more visi­bil­ity be­tween lead­ers and dis­tant work­ers. Visi­bil­ity, in par­tic­u­lar, would need to be bidi­rec­tional, “

Group pro­jects con­sist­ing of two stu­dents each from three differ­ent schools, some­times in­ter­na­tional. Note that there was no con­trol and stu­dents are just bad at things, and didn’t have as much time to gel.

“Five types of prob­lems con­sti­tut­ing failures of mu­tual knowl­edge are iden­ti­fied: failure to com­mu­ni­cate and re­tain con­tex­tual in­for­ma­tion, un­evenly dis­tributed in­for­ma­tion, difficulty com­mu­ni­cat­ing and un­der­stand­ing the salience of in­for­ma­tion, differ­ences in speed of ac­cess to in­for­ma­tion, and difficulty in­ter­pret­ing the mean­ing of silence”

“un­rec­og­nized differ­ences in­the situ­a­tions, con­texts, and con­straints of dis­persed col­lab­o­ra­tors con­sti­tute “hid­den pro­files” that can in­crease the like­li­hood of dis­po­si­tional rather than situ­a­tional at­tri­bu­tion, with con­se­quences for co­he­sion and learn­ing”

“ Mu­tual knowl­edge is knowl­edge that the com­mu­ni­cat­ing par­ties share in com­mon and know they share”

“Estab­lish­ing mu­tual knowl­edge is im­por­tant be­cause it in­creases the like­li­hood that com­mu­ni­ca­tion will be un­der­stood”

“ Pro­ceed­ing with­out mu­tual knowl­edge, peo­ple may speak and un­der­stand what is said on the ba­sis of their own in­for­ma­tion and in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the situ­a­tion, falsely as­sum­ing that the other speaks and un­der­stands on the ba­sis of that same in­for­ma­tion and in­ter­pre­ta­tion”

“It is well es­tab­lished that groups that meet face-to-face tend to dwell on com­monly held in­for­ma­tion in their dis­cus­sions and over­look uniquely held in­for­ma­tion...When a group’s dis­cus­sion is me­di­ated by tech­nol­ogy, the prob­lem seems to be worse”

“ The com­puter-me­di­ated groups ex­changed less in­for­ma­tion over­all and took more time do­ing it. One of the most ro­bust find­ings con­cern­ing the effect of com­puter me­di­a­tion on com­mu­ni­ca­tion is that it pro­ceeds at a slower rate than does face-to-fac”

“”A de­lay of 1.6 sec­onds is suffi­cient to dis­rupt the abil­ity of the sender to re­fer effi­ciently to the . . . stim­uli, de­spite the fact that the back-chan­nel re­sponse is even­tu­ally trans­mit­ted”

Com­puter me­di­ated in­ter­ac­tions are less rich, lead­ing peo­ple to read too much in to what non-ver­bals they do get.

It is im­por­tant that when a prob­lem arises, pe­olpe at­tribute it to the cor­rect cause. In par­tic­u­lar, don’t blame the per­son when the situ­a­tion is the cause

“ peo­ple us­ing com­puter-me­di­ated com­mu­ni­ca­tion with re­mote oth­ers they do not know well rely heav­ily on so­cial cat­e­go­riza­tions to guide their re­la­tion­ships. The so­cial cat­e­go­riza­tions provide a ba­sis for af­fili­a­tion if par­ti­ci­pants share a sig­nifi­cant so­cial iden­tity. How­ever, they also can provide fod­der for in-group/​out-group dy­nam­ics if re­mote oth­ers are seen as be­long­ing to so­cial cat­e­gories differ­ent and less at­trac­tive than one­self”

“The data were con­tained in an archival dataset that was cre­ated in the course of a col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­ject in­volv­ing grad­u­ate busi­ness fac­ulty and stu­dents lo­cated at nine uni­ver­si­ties on three con­ti­nents”

No co-lo­cated con­trols.

“De­spite efforts to make pro­ject re­quire­ments con­sis­tent across all nine uni­ver­si­ties, differ­ences were dis­cov­ered as the pro­ject un­folded”

“s. In seven of the 13 teams, con­flict es­ca­lated to the point that hos­tile coal­i­tions formed. In five of these teams, mem­bers at two sites be­gan to com­plain about part­ners at the third site, re­fus­ing in some cases to send them pieces of the team’s work or put their names on finished work. Two teams ev­i­denced shift­ing coal­i­tions among sub­groups at the three sites”

“Even­tu­ally, Ichar­ac­ter­ized five types of prob­lems: (1) failure to com­mu­ni­cate and re­tain con­tex­tual in­for­ma­tion, (2) un­evenly dis­tributed in­for­ma­tion, (3) differ­ences in the salience of in­for­ma­tion to in­di­vi­d­u­als, (4) rel­a­tive differ­ences in speed of ac­cess to in­for­ma­tion, and (5) in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the mean­ing of silence.”

(1) failure to com­mu­ni­cate and re­tain con­tex­tual information

E.g. Team mem­bers re­fused to sched­ule group chat and in­sisted on phone call, but chat was a re­quired part of the pro­ject for other team members

Not in­form­ing each other of spring break (which oc­curred at differ­ent times for differ­ent schools).

Not in­form­ing team mem­bers they were dis­ap­pear­ing for other pro­jects or tests

As­sume co-lo­cated team mem­bers shared more info than they did

Team mem­bers on e-mail missed that other peo­ple weren’t in­cluded or that their emails were mis­spel­led. “ Some­times peo­ple knew they were ex­chang­ing mail with only part of the team, but failed to un­der­stand how this af­fected the per­spec­tives of team mem­bers who did not re­ceive the mail, or how it af­fected the dy­nam­ics of the team as a whole”

Peo­ple re­tained re­sent­ments that oth­ers were “un­re­spon­sive”, even when they saw proof the per­son had at­tempted to com­mu­ni­cate and it was not their fault (e.g. mis­spel­led an e-mail ad­dress).

“In re­la­tion­ships con­ducted face-to-face, it is a challeng­ing cog­ni­tive ex­er­cise to in­ter­pret a set of facts from the per­spec­tive of an­other per­son. It is far more difficult to de­ter­mine how the in­for­ma­tion be­fore the other party differs from one’s own, and then see things from the other’s per­spec­tive. Geo­graphic dis­per­sion makes these two ac­tivi­ties more difficult be­cause of un­de­tected “leaks in the bucket,” be­cause part­nerseem to have difficulty re­tain­ing in­for­ma­tion about re­mote lo­ca­tions, and be­cause feed­back pro­cesses are la­bo­ri­ous”

Pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions give an in­ac­cu­rate per­cep­tion of the pace of work

Differ­ences in the salience of information

Con­fu­sion to do in­di­rect wording

“there was a ten­dency to re­quest feed­back from the team in­di­rectly, yet to ex­pect quick re­sponses from ev­ery­one”

In­cor­rect as­sump­tion that ev­ery­one had 24⁄7 ac­cess to email. Some could only check email at school

Phys­i­cal dis­tance meant that US <-> US com­mu­ni­ca­tion was faster than US <-> AUS com­mu­ni­ca­tion (I ex­pect this to be less of an is­sue now). This meant ev­ery­one’s mes­sages were fol­lowed by un­re­lated mes­sages rather than re­sponses. This was “… at­tributed to re­mote part­ners’ lack of con­scien­tious­ness”

Got time differ­ence wrong

Peo­ple failed to con­vey which top­ics in an email were most im­por­tant. In per­son you can check com­pre­hen­sion as you go and look for re­ac­tions.

In­ter­pret­ing Silence

“t silence had meant all of the fol­low­ing at one time or an­other: Ia­gree. I strongly dis­agree. I am in­differ­ent. I am out of town. I am hav­ing tech­ni­cal prob­lems. Idon’t know how to ad­dress this sen­si­tive is­sue. I am busy with other things. Idid not no­tice your ques­tion. I did not re­al­ize that you wanted a re­spons”

“In­for­ma­tion prob­lems seemed to be more dam­ag­ing to re­la­tion­ships than to task perfor­mance”

High­est-har­mony team did not grade that great, per­haps be­cause their un­will­ing­ness to dis­agree meant they didn’t hone each oth­ers’ ideas.

“ there may be a ten­dency to gen­er­al­ize such so­cial per­cep­tions, par­tic­u­larly nega­tive ones, to the lo­ca­tional sub­group of which a per­son is a mem­ber, which sets in mo­tion in-group/​out-group dy­nam­ics (Point [7]) that are de­struc­tive to group co­he­sion”

“ Mem­bers of the teams I stud­ied of­ten failed to guess which of the many fea­tures of their con­text and situ­a­tion differed from the con­texts and situ­a­tions of re­mote part­ner”

“The au­thors pro­pose that trust­ing ac­tion and demon­strated re­li­a­bil­ity in­crease trust in dis­persed teams. How­ever, my work sug­gests that hu­man and tech­ni­cal er­rors in in­for­ma­tion dis­tri­bu­tion may be com­mon in dis­persed col­lab­o­ra­tion, par­tic­u­larly dur­ing the early phases of ac­tivity. If these are in­ter­preted as failures of per­sonal re­li­a­bil­ity, they are likely to in­hibit the de­vel­op­ment and main­te­nance of trust. “

“ when peo­ple work un­der heavy cog­ni­tive load, they be­come more likely to make per­sonal rather than situ­a­tional at­tri­bu­tio”

“qual­i­ta­tive study of 164 work­ers on globally dis­tributed teams”, over 1.5 years

“Wil­son et al. (2006) demon­strate that trust starts lower in me­di­ated groups but de­vel­ops to lev­els com­pa­rable to face-to-face groups (al­though pure elec­tronic groups never achieved the same lev­els of co­op­er­a­tion as those who met face-to-face)”

“Walther (1992, 1996), for ex­am­ple, lev­er­ages so­cial in­for­ma­tion pro­cess­ing the­ory to ar­gue that, al­though the pro­cess may be slower, rap­port among mem­bers of dis­tributed dyads that never meet can even­tu­ally ex­ceed that of col­lo­cated dyads. Similarly, Wil­son et al. (2006) demon­strate that trust starts lower in me­di­ated groups but de­vel­ops to lev­els com­pa­rable to face-to-face groups (al­though pure elec­tronic groups never achieved the same lev­els of co­op­er­a­tion as those who met face-to-face). Field re­search on vir­tual teams has also claimed that knowl­edge repos­i­to­ries are an ad­e­quate sub­sti­tute for face-to-face in­ter­ac­tion (Malho­tra et al. 2001)”

“Grin­ter et al. (1999), for ex­am­ple, re­port that cowork­ers who did not meet face-to-face had more difficulty cre­at­ing rap­port and de­vel­op­ing a longterm work­ing re­la­tion­ship. Alge et al. (2003) also find that cowork­ers who met face-to-face and got to know one an­other be­fore em­bark­ing on a me­di­ated col­lab­o­ra­tive task re­ported as much open­ness and trust as those who worked face-to-face the en­tire time. In an early re­view, Ol­son and Ol­son (2000) con­clude that face-to­face in­ter­ac­tion is im­por­tant to es­tab­lish­ing the con­di­tions nec­es­sary for dis­tributed work. In their lon­gi­tu­di­nal study of three globally dis­tributed teams, Maznevski and Chu­doba (2000) fur­ther de­scribe how reg­u­lar faceto-face meet­ings cre­ate the rhythms that en­able high­er­level co­or­di­na­tion. Touch­ing (e.g., hand­shakes, pats on the back) and “break­ing bread” to­gether also have been found to con­tribute to a state of com­mu­nica­tive readi­ness among dis­tant work­ers (e.g., Nardi 2005). With few ex­cep­tions, re­search on dis­tributed work con­sis­tently points to the im­por­tance of face-to-face con­tact as a means of build­ing trust and rap­port (e.g., Or­likowski 2002), trans­lat­ing lo­cally situ­ated knowl­edge (Sole and Ed­mond­son 2002), in­ter­act­ing more rapidly on tasks (Crow­ston et al. 2007), and build­ing so­cial net­works (Or­likowski 2002). This re­search gen­er­ally sug­gests that pe­ri­odic face-to-face in­ter­ac­tion plays an im­por­tant role for dis­tributed work­ers, al­though what hap­pens dur­ing these en­coun­ters re­mains largely a mys­tery.”

“Mortensen and Neeley (2012) that shows that work­ers who travel to the lo­ca­tion of their cowork­ers have more knowl­edge, both di­rect (about their dis­tant cowork­ers) and re­flected (about their own lo­ca­tion), and that this knowl­edge is as­so­ci­ated with feel­ings of close­ness and trust”

“more time to­gether leads to more fa­mil­iar­ity, al­though a plateau seems to be reached fairly quickly in lab­o­ra­tory set­tings “

“n see­ing work­ers act­ing on their knowl­edge and work­ing di­rectly with them as they did so that cowork­ers truly be­gan to un­der­stand the ca­pa­bil­ities of their cowork­ers and how they needed to work to­gether to lev­er­age those skills most effec­tively.”

“. In­for­mants told us that af­ter site vis­its, they and their dis­tant cowork­ers re­sponded in a much more timely man­ner to emails and re­quests”

Not in­te­grat­ing a vis­i­tor has a ter­rible effect on their morale and doesn’t gen­er­ate any of the benefits of a good visit.

“We spec­u­late that travel needs to oc­cur on a reg­u­lar ba­sis with in­ter­vals of about six months, plus or minus de­pend­ing on the am­bi­guity of the pro­ject”

“We stud­ied three global vir­tual teams, col­lect­ing data over a pe­riod of 21 months: 9 months of in­ten­sive ob­ser­va­tion and col­lec­tion, pre­ceded by 3 months of in­for­mal dis­cus­sions with the teams and their man­agers, and fol­lowed by 9 months of more dis­cus­sions.”

“Effec­tive out­comes were as­so­ci­ated with a fit among an in­ter­ac­tion in­ci­dent’s form, de­ci­sion pro­cess, and com­plex­ity”

“ In some stud­ies face-to-face groups performed bet­ter than tech­nol­ogy-me­di­ated groups (e.g., Hightower and Say­eed 1996, Smith and Vanecek 1990); in oth­ers they performed worse (e.g., Ocker et al. 1995–1996, Straus 1996); in oth­ers there was no differ­ence on qual­ity-re­lated out­comes (e.g., Farmer and Hy­att 1994, Valacich et al. 1993). Fur­ther­more, these re­la­tion­ships changed and evolved over time (e.g., Hol­ling­shead et al. 1993). Although task type was of­ten pro­posed to mod­er­ate the re­la­tion­ship be­tween a medium and its effect on perfor­mance (e.g., O’Con­nor et al. 1993), there did not seem to be a con­sis­tent pat­tern of task types for which com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­ogy was bet­ter or worse. Some stud­ies con­cluded that a com­bi­na­tion of me­dia in­clud­ing face-to-face out­performed one with­out face-to-face (e.g., Ocker et al. 1998).”

“trust, which was crit­i­cal to the team’s abil­ity to man­age de­ci­sion pro­cesses, could be built swiftly; how­ever, this trust was very frag­ile.”

“This ba­sic pat­tern is defined by reg­u­lar faceto-face meet­ings in which the in­ten­sity of in­ter­ac­tion is ex­tremely high, fol­lowed by a pe­riod of some weeks in which in­ter­ac­tion in­ci­dents are less in­tense. More­over, the de­ci­sion pro­cess is or­ga­nized to match this tem­po­ral pat­tern, rather than the other way around”

MakeTech and Sel­lTech chose the kind of in­ter­ac­tion (phone, fax, etc) to match the task, NewTech did not.

“an equally im­por­tant trust mechanism is “re­flected knowl­edge,” knowl­edge that work­ers gain about the per­sonal char­ac­ter­is­tics, re­la­tion­ships, and be­hav­ioral norms of their own site through the lens of their dis­tant col­lab­o­ra­tors. Based on sur­veys gath­ered from 140 em­ploy­ees in a di­vi­sion of a global chem­i­cal com­pany, we found that di­rect knowl­edge and re­flected knowl­edge en­hanced trust in dis­tinct ways”

“some re­searchers have ar­gued that trust is more eas­ily gen­er­ated in col­lo­cated set­tings, be­cause col­lo­cated work­ers are bet­ter placed than their dis­tributed coun­ter­parts to use be­hav­ioral cues to read in­ten­tions and foster a col­lec­tive iden­tity (Frank 1993, Wil­son et al. 2006)”

“de­ci­sion mak­ers with a co­op­er­a­tive mind­set were more prone to in­ter­pret oth­ers’ ac­tions as efforts to co­or­di­nate. This, in turn was found to in­crease the qual­ity of their in­ter­ac­tion out­comes ”

“highly mo­ti­vated liars in­ter­act­ing in a text-based, com­puter-me­di­ated en­vi­ron­ment were more suc­cess­ful in de­ceiv­ing their part­ners com­pared to mo­ti­vated liars in­ter­act­ing face-to-face”

An Em­piri­cal Anal­y­sis of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion on Trust Build­ing in Vir­tual Teams

Makoto Shin­nishi1or­cid, Ku­nihiko Higa2

Com­pared 5 teams with text-only com­mu­ni­ca­tion, “ five teams could use a non-text com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool through which one can see other mem­ber’s situ­a­tion with a web cam­era image and a short text mes­sage. “

“use of non-text com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool did not af­fect trust build­ing; how­ever, amount of aware­ness com­mu­ni­ca­tion af­fected trust build­ing. Log-in to the com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tem at the same time also af­fected trust build­ing. The find­ings of this study showed the ten­dency of aware­ness com­mu­ni­ca­tion helping team build­ing trust in the re­mote en­vi­ron­ment.”

Aware­ness = “knowl­edge about the work and worker of cur­rent and pre­dicted fu­ture sta­tus and situ­a­tion.”

“In this pa­per, we de­velop a the­ory-based ex­pla­na­tion of how ge­o­graph­i­cal dis­tri­bu­tion pro­vokes team-level con­flict.”

“Geo­graph­i­cally dis­tributed teams face a num­ber of unique challenges, in­clud­ing be­ing coached from a dis­tance, cop­ing with the cost and stress of fre­quent travel, and deal­ing with re­peated de­lays (Arm­strong and Cole 2002).”

“Field stud­ies fur­ther in­di­cate that ge­o­graph­i­cally dis­tributed teams may ex­pe­rience con­flict as a re­sult of two fac­tors: The dis­tance that sep­a­rates team mem­bers and their re­li­ance on tech­nol­ogy to com­mu­ni­cate and work with one an­other.”

“Arm­strong and Cole (2002) re­ported that con­flicts in ge­o­graph­i­cally dis­tributed teams went uniden­ti­fied and un­ad­dressed longer than con­flicts in col­lo­cated teams.”

“t ge­o­graph­i­cal dis­tri­bu­tion will have a sig­nifi­cant im­pact on each type of group con­flict pro­posed in re­cent or­ga­ni­za­tional stud­ies: task, af­fec­tive, and pro­cess. Task con­flict refers to dis­agree­ments fo­cused on work con­tent. Affec­tive con­flict (some­times referred to as re­la­tion­ship or emo­tional con­flict) refers to team dis­agree­ments that are char­ac­ter­ized by anger or hos­tility among group mem­bers. Pro­cess con­flict refers to dis­agree­ments over the team’s ap­proach to the task, its meth­ods, and its group pro­cesses.”

“task con­flict has been found to be benefi­cial for perfor­mance on many tra­di­tional teams, but we con­tend that it will not be so for their dis­tributed coun­ter­parts.”

“Distributed teams en­able firms to take ad­van­tage of ex­per­tise around the globe, to con­tinue work around the clock, and to cre­ate closer re­la­tion­ships with far-flung cus­tomers. “

“We con­tend that all other traits that may be as­so­ci­ated with ge­o­graph­i­cal dis­tri­bu­tion de­rive from dis­tance or tech­nol­ogy me­di­a­tion, and we con­sider them in our anal­y­sis of these two fac­tors”

“mem­bers of dis­tributed teams may have difficulty es­tab­lish­ing a shared con­text”

“in a study of the use of new ma­chines in a fac­tory, Tyre and von Hip­pel (1997) ob­served that en­g­ineers and op­er­a­tors had trou­ble re­solv­ing equip­ment prob­lems over the phone be­cause the en­g­ineers needed to “see for them­selves” the tech­nol­ogy in con­text.”

“When team mem­bers have differ­ent un­der­stand­ings of the task, task con­flict is likely to re­sult (Jehn et al. 1997). More­over, when team mem­bers’ un­der­stand­ing of the is­sues differs, con­flict is difficult to re­solve (Brehmer 1976)”

“Team mem­bers who lack a sense of a shared con­text as a re­sult of dis­tance also are likely to ad­here to differ­ent norms”

“Grin­ter et al. (1999) found that mem­bers of dis­tributed soft­ware de­vel­op­ment teams, re­gard­less of the way they struc­tured their work, were “con­stantly sur­prised” and con­fused about the ac­tivi­ties of their dis­tant col­leagues.”

“re­search on friend­ship sug­gests that dis­tributed teams will ex­pe­rience less friend­ship and, thus, less af­fec­tive con­flict.”

“stud­ies that sug­gest that time can rem­edy the re­la­tional prob­lems that en­sue from tech­nol­ogy me­di­a­tion”

“Feel­ings of not “be­ing there” with one’s com­mu­ni­ca­tion part­ners stand to pre­vent dis­tributed team mem­bers from shar­ing re­la­tional in­for­ma­tion that help teams to de­velop trust”

“Un­even dis­tri­bu­tion can oc­cur in at least two ways: Team mem­bers may be pur­posely or ac­ci­den­tally ex­cluded from com­mu­ni­ca­tions, or mem­bers may not re­veal in­for­ma­tion that they uniquely hold.”

“Distributed teams ap­pear to gain more if they meet early in the de­vel­op­ment of the group (Kraut et al. 1992), en­abling mem­bers to form re­la­tion­ships that can be sup­ported over tech­nolo­gies (Arm­strong and Cole 2002)”

“. If dis­tributed teams are able to meet face to face at the points with the most po­ten­tial for con­flict, then con­flict may be re­duced or diminished.”

“Estab­lish­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive norms, how­ever, may be sig­nifi­cantly more difficult in dis­tributed teams.”

Chap­ter 4 The Place of Face-to-Face Com­mu­ni­ca­tion in Distributed Work

Bon­nie A. Nardi and Steve Whittaker

Chap­ter 5: The (Cur­rently) Unique Ad­van­tages of Col­lo­cated Work

Ju­dith S. Ol­son, Stephanie Teasley, Lisa Covi, and Gary Olson

“ com­mu­ni­ca­tion fre­quency among in­di­vi­d­u­als drops con­sid­er­ably with dis­tance and that af­ter about thirty me­ters, it reaches asymp­tote. This means that if two peo­ple reside more than 30 me­ters apart, they may as well be across the con­ti­nent”

This pa­per is talk­ing about rad­i­cal co-lo­ca­tion: 6-8 peeps in the same room. Any fur­ther than that doesn’t count.

“Teams who ex­pe­rienced rad­i­cal col­lo­ca­tion—pi­o­neer teams—were much more pro­duc­tive than stan­dard teams at both this com­pany and in the in­dus­try as a whole.”

“Th­ese teams pro­duced twice as much as other teams did in their mul­ti­tasked work, in stan­dard office cu­bi­cles, in pro­jects with more vari­able scop­ing. The col­lo­cated teams got the job done in about one-third the amount of time com­pared to the com­pany baseline—and even faster than the in­dus­try stan­dard. Both of these differ­ences are sig­nifi­cant us­ing a z-score against com­pany baseline (p < .001).”

I think they had other ad­van­tages over the con­trol group, such as hav­ing only one task. And of course there’s Hawthorne effect.

“Fol­low-on teams were even more pro­duc­tive than the pi­o­neer teams; func­tion points per staff month dou­bled again while cy­cle time stayed about the same. We be­lieve this sec­ond in­crease has to do in part with the fact that some of the team mem­bers now had ex­pe­rience (some pi­lot team mem­bers served on fol­low-on teams), and there was some or­ga­ni­za­tional learn­ing about how to run and man­age such groups.”

I’m ex­tremely cu­ri­ous how of­ten team mem­bers used the available solo offices.

Pro­duc­tivity mea­sured in func­tion points, so it’s pos­si­ble they were just bet­ter at es­ti­mat­ing.

Mo­rale effects (pos­i­tive and nega­tive) were more con­ta­gious. Even the team with shit morale was more pro­duc­tive than stan­dard teams.

White boards and sticky notes were very popular

Tivoli vs. IBM: quite close

Chap­ter 6: Un­der­stand­ing Effects of Prox­im­ity on Col­lab­o­ra­tion: Im­pli­ca­tions for Tech­nolo­gies to Sup­port Re­mote Col­lab­o­ra­tive Work

“ For ex­am­ple, in col­lab­o­ra­tion at a dis­tance, com­mu­ni­ca­tion is typ­i­cally less fre­quent, char­ac­ter­ized by longer lags be­tween mes­sages, and more effort­ful.”

Is less fre­quent a down­side?

“Re­sults showed that even in this en­vi­ron­ment, pairs of re­searchers were un­likely to com­plete a tech­ni­cal re­port to­gether un­less their offices were phys­i­cally near each other, even if they had pre­vi­ously pub­lished on similar top­ics or worked in the same de­part­ment in the com­pany. “

But in­ter­na­tional col­lab­o­ra­tions happen

What tools can re­place hal­lways?

Eliz­a­beth’s ob­ser­va­tion: this works bet­ter for ex­tro­verts and multitaskers

“ the most im­por­tant prob­lem is that when con­ver­sa­tion is ini­ti­ated in per­son, the peo­ple must be si­mul­ta­neously pre­sent”

“ An­cona and Cald­well (1992),demon­strated that prob­lems can arise when peo­ple con­cen­trate com­mu­ni­ca­tion within a su­per­vi­sory group and fail to ex­change enough in­for­ma­tion with oth­ers out­side the group”

Cha­t­rooms are a par­tial sub­sti­tute for hallways

“Be­cause spo­ken ut­ter­ances are ephemeral, un­like mes­sages on an an­swer­ing ma­chine or in a writ­ten doc­u­ment, the listener can­not pause or reread the mes­sage when some por­tion is difficult. Again, how­ever, the abil­ity to ask for clar­ifi­ca­tion par­tially com­pen­sates for the ephemeral na­ture of speech. When there are many listen­ers, how­ever, it is far more costly for a sin­gle one whose at­ten­tion has wan­dered to stop the speaker for clar­ifi­ca­tion”

“ease of lo­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion and in­for­ma­tion ac­qui­si­tion may bias the in­for­ma­tion tracked by a work group, caus­ing them to over­at­tend to lo­cal in­for­ma­tion at the ex­pense of more re­mote, con­tex­tual in­for­ma­tion.”

“ By un­der­stand­ing what leads to per­ceived prox­im­ity, we also be­lieve that man­agers can achieve many of the benefits of co-lo­ca­tion with­out ac­tu­ally hav­ing em­ploy­ees work in one place.”

“As team mem­bers dis­cover that they share a cer­tain so­cial cat­e­gory, they es­tab­lish a com­mon ground from which they can work “

“the more two peo­ple iden­tify with some so­cial cat­e­gory, en­tity or ex­pe­rience (e.g. pro­fes­sion, gen­der, eth­nic­ity, com­mon poli­ti­cal views, shared trauma, etc.), the more com­mon ground they will have be­tween them and, thus, the more prox­i­mal they are likely to feel.”

They use the ex­am­ple of two moth­ers of young chil­dren. I sus­pect this effect is much stronger if the far-apart peo­ple share a trait they don’t share with peo­ple nearby.

This is con­sis­tent with other re­search show­ing peo­ple are more likely to com­mit the fun­da­men­tal at­tri­bu­tion er­ror against dis­tant peo­ple.

“As one sub­group sought to differ­en­ti­ate it­self from the other, less com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween the two groups en­sued, re­sult­ing in even fewer op­por­tu­ni­ties to dis­cover and de­velop a shared iden­tity. “

“an or­ga­ni­za­tion with strong struc­tural as­surance might have very rigor­ous hiring stan­dards. As a re­sult, em­ploy­ees of the or­ga­ni­za­tion would feel com­fortable com­mu­ni­cat­ing with dis­tant co-work­ers — safe in the knowl­edge that they were deal­ing with com­pe­tent and re­li­able pro­fes­sion­als”

This was definitely pre­sent at Google

“e, the tech­nolog­i­cal in­fras­truc­ture for open-source pro­jects (ver­sion con­trol sys­tems, spe­cial­ized topic-based dis­cus­sion fo­rums, and so on) pro­vides rich and sta­ble sup­port for com­plex work and in­ter­per­sonal in­ter­ac­tions be­tween de­vel­op­ers who rarely if ever see each other “

High open­ness to ex­pe­rience → less as­sump­tion of bad faith of col­league’s part.

“feel­ing close re­duces the un­cer­tainty and am­bi­guity of work­ing at a dis­tance and im­proves at least two of the three di­men­sions of group effec­tive­ness: (1) ca­pa­bil­ity to work to­gether in the fu­ture; and (2) growth and well-be­ing of team mem­bers”

Hav­ing a co-lo­cated co-worker visit an­other site helps your re­la­tion­ship with peo­ple at that site, even if you don’t visit your­self.

Too much close­ness leads to nega­tive feel­ings, such as wor­ries about surveillance.

“t me­dia differ­ences ex­isted for teams lack­ing a his­tory, with face-to-face teams ex­hibit­ing higher open­ness/​trust and in­for­ma­tion shar­ing than com­puter-me­di­ated teams. How­ever, com­puter-me­di­ated teams with a his­tory were able to elimi­nate these differ­ences. Th­ese find­ings did not ex­tend to team-mem­ber ex­change (TMX). Although face-to-face teams ex­hibited higher TMX com­pared to com­puter-me­di­ated teams, the in­ter­ac­tion of tem­po­ral scope and com­mu­ni­ca­tion me­dia was not sig­nifi­cant. In ad­di­tion, open­ness/​trust and TMX were pos­i­tively as­so­ci­ated with de­ci­sion-mak­ing effec­tive­ness when task in­ter­de­pen­dence was high, but were un­re­lated to de­ci­sion-mak­ing effec­tive­ness when task in­ter­de­pen­dence was low”

to sub­group dy­nam­ics char­ac­ter­ized by an us-verses-them at­ti­tude across sites

(Arm­strong & Cole, 1995; Cram­ton, 2001; Hinds & Bailey, 2003

“

see Gib­son & Co­hen, 2003; Hinds & Kiesler, 2002

Diver­sity isn’t bad, it’s when mul­ti­ple traits are cor­re­lated that you get fault lines

“Merely be­com­ing aware of the pres­ence of sub­groups is ad­e­quate to trig­ger in­group-out­group dy­nam­ics”

“t eth­no­cen­trism is re­duced un­der con­di­tions of con­tact be­tween groups of equal sta­tus that are pur­su­ing com­mon goals with in­sti­tu­tional or so­cial sup­port”

Try­ing to erase team differ­ences costs you the abil­ity to learn from teams

“Un­der cer­tain con­di­tions, peo­ple can rec­og­nize the pos­i­tive qual­ities of their own group as well as other groups, con­sti­tut­ing what we call an at­ti­tude of mu­tual pos­i­tive dis­tinc­tive­ness”

Shared goal == good

“We con­clude that mo­ti­va­tion to en­gage across differ­ences is re­duced when groups have un­equal sta­tus”

“Our de­pen­dence on in­stant mes­sag­ing and short­hand up­dates have de­creased our like­li­hood to brain­storm, opt­ing for a quick WTF or LOL, rather than an at­tempt to build off a crazy idea.”

Marissa Mayer: ““Peo­ple are more pro­duc­tive when they’re alone, but they’re more col­lab­o­ra­tive and in­no­va­tive when they’re to­gether. Some of the best ideas come from pul­ling two differ­ent ideas to­gether.””

How do vir­tual teams pro­cess in­for­ma­tion? A liter­a­ture re­view and im­pli­ca­tions for management

Petru L. Curs¸eu, Rene´ Schalk and Inge Wesse

“Vir­tual teams are bet­ter in ex­chang­ing in­for­ma­tion and in over­com­ing in­for­ma­tion bi­ases. How­ever, they en­counter prob­lems in us­ing and in­te­grat­ing in­for­ma­tion. A greater pool of knowl­edge leads to higher mem­ory in­terfer­ence in vir­tual teams. Nev­er­the­less, in vir­tual teams, pro­cesses such as plan­ning and co­or­di­na­tion, are less effec­tive and the emer­gence of trust and co­he­sion is more difficult to achieve. Th­ese op­pos­ing effects limit the po­ten­tial of bet­ter knowl­edge in­te­gra­tion in vir­tual teams.”

“the de­vel­op­ment of trust, co­he­sion and a strong team iden­tity is one of the most difficult challenges for man­agers of vir­tual teams. “

“Espe­cially in the ini­tial phases of the team pro­ject, meet­ing face-to-face will let the team mem­bers get ac­quainted with each other. Direct con­tact is es­sen­tial for the de­vel­op­ment of trust and co­he­sion”

Depart­ment of Man­age­ment, School of Busi­ness, Univer­sity of Con­necti­cut, 2100 Hillside Road,

Unit 1041, Storrs, CT 06269-1041, USA

M. Travis Maynard

Depart­ment of Man­age­ment, School of Busi­ness, Univer­sity of Con­necti­cut, 2100 Hillside Road,

Unit 1041, Storrs, CT 06269-1041, USA

2004

“ re­searchers have noted the ten­dency of VTs to pos­sess a shorter life­cy­cle as com­pared to face-to-face teams”

“thee num­ber of ideas gen­er­ated in VTs has been found to in­crease with group size, which con­trasts with re­sults found in face-to-face groups”

“, the ad­di­tion of video re­sources re­sults in sig­nifi­cant im­prove­ments to the qual­ity of a team’s de­ci­sions (Baker, 2002)”

“com­pared to men, women in VTs per­ceived their teams as more in­clu­sive and sup­port­ive, and were more satis­fied. Also, in a study of e-mail com­mu­ni­ca­tion among knowl­edge work­ers from North Amer­ica, Asia, and Europe, Gefen and Straub (1997) found that women viewed e-mail as hav­ing greater use­ful­ness, but found no gen­der differ­ences in lev­els of us­age. Bhappu, Griffith and Northcraft (1997) ex­am­ined the effects of com­mu­ni­ca­tion dy­nam­ics and me­dia in di­verse groups, and found that in­di­vi­d­u­als in face-to-face groups paid more at­ten­tion to in-group/​out-group differ­ences in terms of gen­der than those in VTs.”

“found that col­lo­cated teams re­ported a sig­nifi­cantly lower num­ber of difficul­ties with var­i­ous as­pects of pro­ject man­age­ment (such as keep­ing on sched­ule and stay­ing on bud­get) than did vir­tual or global teams”

“or by team mem­bers com­pared to in­ter­ac­tions within face-to-face con­texts. In par­tic­u­lar, Siegel et al. (1986) found that un­in­hibited be­hav­ior such as swear­ing, in­sults, and name-call­ing was sig­nifi­cantly more likely in CMC groups than in face-to-face groups.” This is worse in men.

“Fi­nally, satis­fac­tion in VTs ap­pears to be af­fected by a team’s gen­der com­po­si­tion. In par­tic­u­lar, all-fe­male VTs tend to re­port higher lev­els of satis­fac­tion than all-male VTs”

“For ne­go­ti­a­tion and in­tel­lec­tive tasks, face-to-face teams have been found to perform sig­nifi­cantly bet­ter that CMC teams, whereas there were no differ­ences found on de­ci­sion-mak­ing tasks (Hol­ling­shead et al., 1993). “

“A type of task in which CMC groups seem to out­perform face-to-face groups is brain­storm­ing and idea-gen­er­a­tion be­cause there is no in­ter­rup­tion from other group mem­bers, in effect al­low­ing all mem­bers to “talk” at the same time. “

“we find that the so­cial cat­e­go­riza­tion in teams with ge­o­graph­i­cally based sub­groups (defined as two or more mem­bers per site) trig­gers sig­nifi­cantly weaker iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the team, less effec­tive trans­ac­tive mem­ory, more con­flict, and more co­or­di­na­tion prob­lems.”

“im­bal­ance in the size of sub­groups (i.e., the un­even dis­tri­bu­tion of mem­bers across sites) in­vokes a com­pet­i­tive, coal­i­tional men­tal­ity that ex­ac­er­bates these effects; sub­groups with a nu­mer­i­cal minor­ity of team mem­bers re­port sig­nifi­cantly poorer scores on iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, trans­ac­tive mem­ory, con­flict, and co­or­di­na­tion prob­lems. In con­trast, teams with ge­o­graph­i­cally iso­lated mem­bers (i.e., mem­bers who have no team­mates at their site) have bet­ter scores on these same four out­comes than both bal­anced and im­bal­anced con­figu­ra­tions.”

“ In teams with­out a com­mon un­der­stand­ing, team mem­bers are more likely to hedge their bets against the er­rors an­ti­ci­pated from oth­ers on the team, thus du­pli­cat­ing efforts and in­creas­ing the like­li­hood of re­work.”

“A com­mon oc­cur­rence on teams is that mem­bers think they have come to agree­ment, but the agree­ment they be­lieve they have reached is viewed differ­ently by differ­ent team mem­bers”

“shared un­der­stand­ing among team mem­bers has these benefits: • En­ables peo­ple to pre­dict the be­hav­iors of team mem­bers • Fa­cil­i­tates effi­cient use of re­sources and effort • Re­duces im­ple­men­ta­tion prob­lems and er­rors • In­creases satis­fac­tion and mo­ti­va­tion of team mem­bers • Re­duces frus­tra­tion and con­flict among team mem­bers”

Need an un­der­stand­ing of both the task and the process

“tele­phone may be bet­ter than text-based sys­tems for de­tect­ing and re­solv­ing mi­s­un­der­stand­ings.”

“Weis­band (forth­com­ing) found that teams that shared in­for­ma­tion about where they were and what they were do­ing performed bet­ter than teams that did not share this in­for­ma­tion”

“Sense mak­ing in the new product de­vel­op­ment sys­tem is by ne­ces­sity vir­tual. It oc­curs si­mul­ta­neously within and across differ­ent lev­els and el­e­ments of the or­ga­ni­za­tional sys­tem. “

“Col­lec­tive trust is a cru­cial el­e­ment of vir­tual team func­tion­ing. “

“col­lec­tive trust can be defined as a shared psy­cholog­i­cal state in a team that is char­ac­ter­ized by an ac­cep­tance of vuln­er­a­bil­ity based on ex­pec­ta­tions of in­ten­tions or be­hav­iors of oth­ers within the team “

“This larger study be­gan in July 1999 and had two phases: in-depth qual­i­ta­tive case anal­y­sis with two differ­ent vir­tual teams from each of eight or­ga­ni­za­tions and a com­pre­hen­sive quan­ti­ta­tive sur­vey that will be ad­ministered in each firm and an­a­lyzed as to statis­ti­cal pre­dic­tors of vir­tual team effec­tive­ness.”

On vir­tual teams “ trust is harder to iden­tify and de­velop, yet may be even more crit­i­cal, be­cause the vir­tual con­text of­ten ren­ders other forms of so­cial con­trol and psy­cholog­i­cal safety less effec­tive or fea­si­ble. “

“Some con­trols ac­tu­ally ap­pear to sig­nal the ab­sence of trust and there­fore can ham­per its emer­gence. In­sti­tu­tional con­trols can also un­der­mine trust when le­gal mechanisms give rise to rigidity in re­sponse to con­flict and sub­sti­tute high lev­els of for­mal­iza­tion for more flex­ible con­flict man­age­ment (Sitkin and Bies, 1994).”

“in­ter­de­pen­dence is also crit­i­cal in es­tab­lish­ing trust in vir­tual teams.”

“A leader is said to emerge in a team when the team as a whole reaches a con­sen­sus that they per­ceive the emer­gent leader to be their leader”

“ We found agree­ment among team mem­bers that lead­ers emerged in nine of the thir­teen vir­tual teams par­ti­ci­pat­ing in our study. “

“For tra­di­tional teams, trust in a leader’s abil­ity to fa­cil­i­tate team task and re­la­tion­ship in­ter­ac­tion effec­tively has been found to be a crit­i­cal fac­tor in achiev­ing the con­sen­sus nec­es­sary for a leader to emerge”

Types of trust:

Can do the tasks to achieve the goal

Altruism

Friendship

Lead­ers were more trusted, es­pe­cially in task competence

May be harder to emerge as a leader in vir­tual teams, in part due to difficulty build­ing trust

Lead­ers sent more mes­sages than av­er­age but not nec­es­sar­ily the most messages

“vir­tual team perfor­mance was not clearly re­lated to emer­gent lead­er­ship within the team”

Skip­ping the de­scrip­tion of prob­lems, as­sum­ing it’s similar to Cram­ton’s other work

Recom­men­da­tions:

“Estab­lish pro­ce­dures for in­for­ma­tion shar­ing within the vir­tual team. It may be helpful for lead­ers to dis­t­in­guish among task, so­cial, and con­tex­tual in­for­ma­tion and to de­sign pro­ce­dures ap­pro­pri­ate to each type of in­for­ma­tion. For ex­am­ple, task-re­lated in­for­ma­tion may be best shared at a weekly dial-in con­fer­ence call in which rep­re­sen­ta­tives at each lo­ca­tion are guaran­teed air­time. It prob­a­bly is a good idea to des­ig­nate a fa­cil­i­ta­tor for such con­fer­ence calls so that time is man­aged, fo­cus is main­tained, and new in­for­ma­tion is made salient to all.”

Weekly calls in­clude a few mo­ments where ev­ery­one says how they are. I think this is in­cor­rect and it makes me doubt their other sug­ges­tions. It will chew up a lot of time, peo­ple won’t listen, and isn’t enough time to ac­tu­ally share any­thing rele­vant.

“ Peo­ple in teams that rely heav­ily on e-mail are there­fore more care­ful with writ­ing than speak­ing be­cause of the per­ma­nency effect of the writ­ten word. Thus, poli­ti­cal be­hav­ior takes on a more care­ful and covert form when doc­u­mented.”

“ Noted one par­ti­ci­pant, “Vir­tual teams are task ori­ented. You do not have enough chances to read and un­der­stand this poli­tics, if it’s there at all. In fact, I don’t feel that I ac­tu­ally have enough op­por­tu­ni­ties to be ex­posed to such ac­tivi­ties in my vir­tual team. We don’t have that much time left for poli­tics; we need to work.””

“Many mul­ti­cul­tural team par­ti­ci­pants try to be “on their best be­hav­ior” when in con­tact with mem­bers from other cul­tures be­cause they feel that they are not only pri­vate in­di­vi­d­u­als but also rep­re­sen­ta­tives of their coun­try and cul­ture. As a re­sult, they tend to use tac­tics that are more ac­cept­able so­cially”

“ In gen­eral, these find­ings in­di­cate that VOP may be sig­nifi­cantly lower than op­er­a­tional poli­tics in con­ven­tional teams. Mem­bers of vir­tual teams re­port lower in­ten­si­ties in the use of in­fluence and poli­ti­cal be­hav­iors com­pared with similar ac­tivi­ties of con­ven­tional face-to-face groups. In ad­di­tion, the most dom­i­nant in­fluence at­tempts used are ra­tio­nal­ity, con­sul­ta­tion, and as­sertive­ness, which are con­sid­ered among the most so­cially ac­cept­able tac­tics and also the most effec­tive ones (Yukl and Tracey, 1992). The use of less ac­cept­able tac­tics such as sanc­tions, ex­ert­ing pres­sures and threats, and block­ing in­for­ma­tion was de­nied by all our in­ter­vie­wees. “

“Me­dia effects is a phrase used to de­scribe all the out­comes that re­sult from the use of a par­tic­u­lar com­mu­ni­ca­tion medium. “

“prac­tice also sug­gests that even teams lo­cated in the same build­ing may com­mu­ni­cate largely by e-mail. In fact, in the or­ga­ni­za­tion de­scribed in this chap­ter, all teams spent an equal amount of time work­ing face-to-face on the team task (ap­prox­i­mately 13 per­cent). E-mail use did vary by whether all the mem­bers were colo­cated, but not to a great ex­tent (34 per­cent of all task com­mu­ni­ca­tion in colo­cated teams ver­sus 45.76 per­cent in dis­tributed teams).”

“What is tech­ni­cally a con­flict about the task, for ex­am­ple, may be taken per­son­ally and thus be ex­pe­rienced as re­la­tion­ship con­flict.”

They looked at twenty eight teams on a spec­trum of virtualness

“ We found that vir­tual teams had greater lev­els of pro­cess con­flict than tra­di­tional teams, but only when also con­trol­ling for the effects of trust. We did not find differ­ences in the lev­els of task or re­la­tion­ship con­flict “

Differ­ence was only .3 out of 5

“Nei­ther trust nor team iden­ti­fi­ca­tion is sig­nifi­cantly re­lated to the dis­tri­bu­tion of the team mem­bers.”

“re­gard­less of vir­tu­al­ness, re­la­tion­ship and pro­cess con­flict have sig­nifi­cantly nega­tive effects on perfor­mance as rated by the team’s man­ager. Task con­flict, how­ever, does not seem to pro­duce these effects.”

“trust was higher the more the team com­mu­ni­cated us­ing e-mail and the more they worked to­gether face-to-face. “

“Zac­caro, Rittman, and Marks (2001) ar­gued that lead­ers con­tribute to team effec­tive­ness by in­fluenc­ing five team pro­cesses: mo­ti­va­tional, af­fec­tive, cog­ni­tive, co­or­di­na­tion, and bound­ary span­ning.”

Trust is the ex­pec­ta­tion that oth­ers will be­have as you ex­pect = abil­ity to pre­dict oth­ers’ behavior

“Team effec­tive­ness is grounded in mem­bers be­ing mo­ti­vated to work hard on be­half of the team. “ that seems in­com­plete at best

“, team mem­bers are more likely to con­tribute more of their in­di­vi­d­ual efforts to col­lec­tive ac­tion when they trust one an­other”

“trust, par­tic­u­larly knowl­edge­based and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion-based trust, evolves from a long pe­riod of face-to-face in­ter­ac­tions”

“t teams with high lev­els of ini­tial trust de­voted al­most half of their early com­mu­ni­ca­tions dur­ing the first 2 weeks of the teams’ ex­is­tence to dis­cus­sions of their fam­i­lies, hob­bies, and week­end so­cial ac­tivi­ties...such com­mu­ni­ca­tions were not suffi­cient to main­tain trust.”

“trust in tem­po­rary teams de­vel­ops when team mem­bers have clearly defined roles with speci­fied and ac­cu­rate be­hav­ioral ex­pec­ta­tions. “

“When vir­tual teams form with mem­bers hav­ing strong pro­fes­sional iden­tities, then swift trust can emerge from sta­ble role ex­pec­ta­tions and sub­se­quent ac­tions are likely to con­firm these ex­pec­ta­tions,strength­en­ing team trust.”

“effec­tive team co­or­di­na­tion de­pends upon the emer­gence of a shared men­tal model”

Skip­ping the stuff on cramp­ton 2001 since I’ve read the source

“team lead­ers need to help their teams set perfor­mance ob­jec­tives that are al­igned with the strate­gic re­quire­ments op­er­at­ing in the team en­vi­ron­ment”